The Governor’s Speech

The Governor of the Bank of England gave a very long speech (with the longest, quite technical, section in the middle about R* apparently aided by ChatGPT) at the LSE a couple of days ago. This had me wondering who he thought he was talking to and therefore, by extension, who he thinks he is representing with his policy choices.

So I drew a cartoon to express my bemusement.

Day 3 of the UCU Strike: fiscal austerity and why this strike is needed

Day 3 of the UCU strike and we move onto fiscal austerity. This is the type of austerity we normally think of – increasing taxes and reducing government spending – and the most prevalent feature of all the UK governments we have had since 2010, with the cumulative lack of investment in the economy which is the underlying cause of most of the industrial action now taking place all around us. People are not just upset that their pay has not kept pace with inflation for 12 years, it is also the cumulative degradation of the conditions under which they work, seek healthcare, seek education for their children, travel anywhere or don ‘t travel anywhere that has enraged so many.

Rishi Sunak says he would love to give nurses a “massive” pay rise, but insists the money needs to be prioritised in other areas of the health service. Jeremy Hunt insists that his priority is tackling inflation and that public sector pay rises cannot be allowed to jeopardise this. Health secretary Steve Barclay hints that striking NHS staff could be offered a better pay deal from April – if unions accept “productivity and efficiency” reforms in return.

But improving productivity at work requires investment in where you work, as numerous studies have confirmed (one example here). Whereas, as the FT has shown recently, the UK has done the following since 2010:

Source: FT graphic by John Burn-Murdoch

And what about Jeremy Hunt’s reasons for keeping pay reducing in real terms in the public sector year after year? That paying an inflation matching increase would in some way “lock in” inflation. As Blair Fix tweeted recently:

Most economists accept that a wage-price spiral is possible, leading to runaway inflation. But why isn’t an interest-price spiral also possible? Interest and wages are just two forms of income. So why is one spiral ‘obvious’ while the other is blasphemy?

It doesn’t make sense until you realize that mainstream economists are in the business of legitimizing capitalist income. Wages can drive inflation (bad workers!) … but capitalist income is always productive.

He has also written about the problems caused by following economic theories treating inflation as a single value, when it is of course an average (or in fact usually at least an average of an average, sometimes switching between arithmetic and geometric averages in the process) taken of a highly volatile underlying data set. It is often said that inflation is redistributive: benefitting borrowers at the expense of lenders. However, one of the insights from Fix’s piece, drawing on Nitzan’s and Bichlar’s work in the 90s, is that big business also benefits from inflation: large corporations and oligopolies are raising prices the fastest at the expense of smaller businesses. Why do we never hear that this is driving inflation?

Because capitalist income is, in their view, “always productive”, you won’t hear about rent-price spirals or profit-price spirals from the current Government. Instead we will hear about how inflation needs to be reduced and this can only be done by further depressing the real value of all of our incomes for another year. This is what the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) has to say about CPI:

Following the Russian invasion of Ukraine, we now expect CPI inflation to peak in the fourth quarter of 2022 at its highest rate in around 40 years. The increase is driven primarily by higher gas prices feeding into sharp rises in domestic energy bills, alongside higher fuel prices and global goods inflation. Inflation then falls rapidly, and temporarily goes negative in mid-2024 as energy bills fall back and some global supply pressures reverse.

Source: Office for Budget Responsibility

On nominal wage growth and its contribution to Real Household Disposable Income (RHDI) they have this to say:

Nominal wage growth is also high in 2022 and 2023, although not high enough to prevent real wages from falling significantly. The contribution of labour income to annual RHDI growth then settles at an average of 2 percentage points a year over the remainder of the forecast.

Since one of the original motivations for starting this blog was the poor forecasting ability of the OBR, I am not going to set too much store on these forecasts, other than to point out the confidence it has that labour income demands will be thwarted and we will all see our real wages fall significantly over the next year. All in pursuit of a policy for which the expected value appears to be 6 months of deflation.

Deflation would be a disaster, As Frances Coppola has written:

Those who have money are happy because they are becoming wealthier. But someone, somewhere, is going hungry.

As she concludes:

So I’d rather money wasn’t deliberately kept scarce to placate savers. Let the supply of money respond to demand for it. When everyone wants to save in the form of money, you need to produce more of it so those who need to spend money don’t starve. Obviously, we don’t want to create so much money that it becomes worthless. But it is better to risk waking the demon of inflation than to deny people the means to live.

So when the Government says that they need to repress my pay in order to avoid locking in inflation, it reminds me of this paragraph from Catch 22:

Morale was deteriorating and it was all Yossarian’s fault. The country was in peril; he was jeopardizing his traditional rights of freedom and independence by daring to exercise them.

A Government intent on crushing real wage growth or even the hope of it while explicitly targeting deflation within the next two years; an extreme assymetry of power between wage earners on the one hand and lobbying corporations and asset owners on the other. This is why so many of us are exercising our traditional rights today.

Cop out

The Congress of Berlin: Disraeli as a tooth-drawer, assisted by Queen Victoria, operates on Sultan Abdul Hamid II of the Ottoman Empire, surrounded by political figures from France, Germany etc. Coloured lithograph by J.J. van Brederode after Jan Steen, 1878. (Steen, Jan, 1626-1679 Reference: 778482i)

If you think COP27 is just a virtue-signalling tree-hugging “gathering of people in Egypt” then Rishi Sunak’s decision not to attend it will make a lot of sense as he tries to grapple with his domestic economic agenda ahead of the autumn statement next month. The Treasury has said that the aim of the statement will be to “to put public spending on a sustainable footing, get debt falling and restore stability.” If you remember, the cause of the “instability” was the foreign exchange and gilt markets, and the lack of confidence in the UK’s economic management internationally. One of the causes of the problems with the UK’s economic management was a failure to think internationally.

COP27 is, in reality, an important international economic conference. This conference is going to be focused on, amongst other things, food security, water security and investing in the future of energy. The support with energy bills is, of course, a major element in the debt levels Sunak is worrying about and, as the cost of living crisis worsens (exacerbated by the Monetary Policy Committee’s expected further increase in interest rates on 3 November), food security is going to rapidly move up his agenda in the coming months. The only difference between the most important concerns of the autumn statement and COP27 are therefore timeframes. COP27 is about medium to long-term thinking. Sunak has indicated, by not attending, that he is only concerned with short-term thinking.

Then there is the agenda around providing a just transition to a net-zero world (ie not skewed in favour of the already wealthy countries) and the sustainability of communities made vulnerable by climate change. This is where the conference starts to resemble other famous international conferences of the past which made the reputations of British statesmen. The illustration above is from the Congress of Berlin in 1878, when the then Tory Prime Minister, Benjamin Disraeli, “acquired” Cyprus in a great powers carve up of the globe. In 1944, towards the end of the second world war, John Maynard Keynes famously sparred with Harry Dexter White from the US Treasury at Bretton Woods as the post-war economic consensus was thrashed out at an international economic conference. They matter.

Of course we don’t carve up the globe any more, you may think, but yes we do. As George Monbiot has pointed out in his excellent Regenesis, the ghost acres (ie the the area, outside their own land, that farms need to operate) of UK agriculture can be as much as 2-3 times as many as the acres we farm domestically. A WWF report from 2020 suggested that the UK’s overseas land footprint has increased by 15% on average compared to their 2011-15 analysis. Between 2016 and 2018, an area equivalent to 88% of the total UK land area was required to supply the UK’s demand for just seven agricultural and forest commodities – beef and leather, cocoa, palm oil, pulp and paper, rubber, soy, and timber. Every time we insist on domestic economic growth as a non-negotiable element of our economic policy, we are effectively exercising a land grab in the global south to achieve it. If Sunak was interested in establishing himself as an international statesman, he would be at COP27.

And finally, of course, there is the terrible human rights record of the Egyptian state, which needs to be called out and challenged to avoid COP27 being just a public relations victory for the military regime led by General Abdel Fatah al-Sisi.

But Sunak has turned his back on all of that, so that he can spend a bit more time with the spreadsheets and economic forecasts in his bunker in Downing Street. It suggests a small-minded, short-term thinker, lacking in vision and ambition. Copping out should not be an option for any Prime Minister, even during a crisis.

Democratising the Lathe

I have been thinking a lot about Ursula K Le Guin’s The Lathe of Heaven over the last few weeks, a book I would highly recommend at any time but particularly at the moment. It is the story of a man, George Orr, who can change reality by dreaming. An ability that terrifies him. He is caught taking unprescribed drugs to try and prevent himself dreaming and as a result is sent for a “voluntary therapeutic treatment” with Dr William Haber, a dream specialist. Haber has built a machine called the Augmentor to make it easier for his patients to have dreams directed by him. He starts to work with Orr, becoming increasingly impatient with Orr’s version of the directions Haber is giving to his dreaming in the machine, until eventually Haber dispenses with Orr and connects himself to the machine instead.

Every time reality is changed it is as if it has always been changed. The changes become increasingly dramatic and disruptive until a peak of general insanity now referred to by all as The Break:

All over the world the various gods were being requested, more or less politely, for an explanation of what had occurred between 6.25 and 7.08 pm Pacific Standard Time.

But what the book really focuses on are George’s desperate attempts to live in this increasingly unhinged reality, as the only person (apart from Haber) aware of the abrupt changes swinging it around, and to hang onto the one person, Heather Lelache (or Andrews in the final version of reality they arrive at), he has ever loved.

One of the sentences on the last page (when he finds out that she has married) has stayed with me in particular:

He stood and endured reality.

However hilarious some of the moments of the last few days have been (and let us not forget some of the highlights here, here and here), we are all going to have to endure some significantly altered reality over the coming years as a result, from the moron risk premium to the cost of living crisis slowly rippling through all aspects of life, at a time when we already have a climate emergency and other planet-wide issues we need to be dealing with. There are many arguments to be had about the best way to tackle all of these problems, and I intend to throw myself fully into those arguments.

However, I would propose that we have to prioritise ensuring that, as a society, we never ever again let the lone mad scientist or economist or politician or former talk show host or indeed anyone else, whoever or however charismatic they are, take over sole control of the machine.

I think we need to do three things to achieve this, before we start to argue over policy:

Adopt proportional representation in parliamentary elections. We have got to broaden the support for whoever is in power, rather than stick with the current system which focuses on a tiny number of people in marginal constituencies and ignores pretty much everyone else. Make Votes Matter have agreed a cross-party document (which I have signed) called the Good Systems Agreement. This sets out the options on voting systems to replace first past the post and the best way of getting there. More about what is wrong with our current system (from the Electoral Reform Society) can be found here. Never again should there be a small cabal of people (like this weekend) deciding on who runs the country – with a steadily shrinking selectorate as their ability to achieve consensus on anything dwindles with every successive decision. We no longer have a system in the UK that can make important decisions and the answer is not more technocracy (leaving it to the so-called clever people, however foolish they may be) or plutocracy (leaving it to the rich), it is more democracy, ie including all of us in the decisions we will have to live with.

Reform media ownership and promote plurality in support of a more democratic and accountable media system. The Media Reform Coalition has produced a manifesto for a people’s media which I support: it includes proposals for an Independent Media Commons – with participatory newsrooms, community radio stations, digital innovators and cultural producers, supported by democratically-controlled public resources to tell the stories of all the UK’s communities. This will allow a much greater range of ideas to be presented to the public and discussed than the current Overton window (see below) and greatly improve our national debate about the things that matter.

Source: 99% Organisation

Reform election finance. Recommendations for doing this were provided in the July 2021 report by the Committee on Standards in Public Life, with 47 recommendations following a comparison of political and electoral finance regulation in 12 countries (Australia, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, and the USA), the majority of which are around reforms to campaign practices, meeting emerging threats around the source of donations, delivering greater transparency and enhancing compliance with election finance law.

We have big problems to solve in the UK and we need everyone to be able to contribute if we are going to solve them. However currently:

  • Our votes are counted in a way which effectively wastes most of them;
  • The information we receive about politics is fed to us through a very partial sieve controlled by a small unrepresentative group of people whose vested interests effectively define our Overton Window; and
  • Influence and access to power often appear to go to the highest bidder rather than the best ideas.

All of this needs to change whoever is Prime Minister in the coming weeks, months and years.

Chartered Actuary: I am still very confident that this is a good idea

I originally talked about Chartered Actuary status (here, with the cartoon above) when the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries (IFoA) first proposed the idea and set up a consultation in 2018. I said then that sometimes an idea comes along that seems so obviously good that you wonder why it hasn’t been done a long time ago.

Four years on from the retreat from the proposal following the slenderest of straw polls offering some challenge, and it remains a good idea. There are still relatively few full actuarial roles available for associates and many firms still assuming a default career path of continuing to fellowship.

There are some differences this time however:

  • There will be two chartered actuary designations: Chartered Actuary (Fellow) and Chartered Actuary (Associate), with the hope that the FIAs who were most concerned with maintaining their distance from AIAs last time will now support the proposal. The original proposal suggested Chartered Actuary (CAct) would be a single distinct qualification, a required qualification point for all student actuaries to reach before going any further and globally recognised as the generalist actuarial qualification from the IFoA. This approach has been abandoned, with no requirement to complete the core curriculum before tackling specialist modules. It will be interesting to see whether Chartered Actuary (Associate) will be seen as a destination in its own right, or just a change of letters. This will depend on all of us within the profession (see below).
  • The environment we are operating in has certainly changed, with the replacement of our regulator, the FRC, by the Audit, Reporting and Governance Authority (ARGA). One of the concerns that the IFoA were looking to address in 2018 was that another, much larger, profession, could pose an existential threat. If actuaries have a unique skill set, which is likely to be lost to a wide range of businesses and other sectors if it is unable to meet the demand for those skills due to a simple lack of numbers, then the need to take any perceived barrier to practise away from our emerging young professionals is clear. The move from FRC to ARGA does not remove this threat and there also remains in the regulatory proposals to date the threat of differential regulation, where actuaries are regulated more heavily than other professionals doing similar work could price us out of markets where we have value to add. The profession therefore needs to grow to increase our voice and influence over the future regulation of the profession.
  • We have acknowledged the impact of the Great Risk Transfer within the finance sector, but in my view the impacts more generally of the increased individual risks and uncertainties millions of the UK population face as energy, food and housing costs escalate need to be faced up to by our profession. For that we need to continue to be a destination of choice for a growing number of your people with a widening range of backgrounds and experiences.

So what do we need to do to make this a change worth making? We need to start behaving like a generalist actuarial qualification is what we want, and offering roles for actuaries on completion of core practice modules in future. It will mean not necessarily insisting on further actuarial specialisation as a requirement for senior roles within our firms. It will mean getting comfortable with a much wider range of specialisms amongst those we consider to be actuaries. Some are already doing this, but most of us need to go much further. A good place to start might be the IFoA’s own website, where the Route to Becoming An Actuary still features a diagram where an IFoA Associate is shown as a milestone on the way to the final destination of becoming a Fellow.

Do cuttlefish dream of the passive electroreception of sharks?

Tom-and-Jerry-tom-and-jerry-81353_800_600” by momokacma is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

We do it all the time. We assume that the animals around us experience the world as we do, with our obsession with the visual sense. We are used to anthropomorphising animals in our cartoons, but it goes much further than that: for instance if, like a dog, your sensory world or Umwelt is primarily based on smell rather than sight, then that daily walk you take with your dog has very different highlights and notable features (amazingly the slits on the side of a dog’s nostrils allow it to smell on out-breaths as well as in-breaths). We have sayings based on these anthropomorphisms: for example, the “unconcerned” frog in the water as it is heated to boiling (cited by Emily Maitlis in her recent speech in Edinburgh) may not be unconcerned at all, merely showing its distress by filling the air with smells like peanut butter, cashew nuts or curry rather than via the reactions we would expect from a human.

Our vision is not even all that extraordinary compared to some other animals. Mantis shrimps have more classes of photoreceptors covering the ultraviolet spectrum than we have in total. They are the only animals who can detect circular polarization, where the plane in which the light is polarized also rotates. However they are much worse than us at telling our visual range of colours apart and may not even have a conception of colour as we know it at all. We don’t know.

We are not even sure how many senses there are. Aristotle said there were five (sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch), but missed our senses of proprioception (ie awareness of your own body) and equilibrioception (ie sense of balance). There are also animals who have a secondary system for detecting odours, or who detect the body heat of their prey via their brain’s visual centre or have sensors which both detect electric fields and pressure. How should we categorise these and does a clear division between senses make any sense? We don’t know.

Elephants can hear each other several miles apart just after sunset, but we don’t know what they are listening for. Beaked whales have a range of crests, ridges and bumps on their skulls which are not outwardly visible other than via the echolocation they use, but we don’t know why.

And finally, for now, the cuttlefish of the title. When cuttlefish sense sharks, who have passive electroreception (ie the ability to detect electric fields in other animals), they stop moving, hold their breath and cover their gill cavities to reduce the voltage of their electric fields by up to 90%. I could go on, but all of this and so much more is contained in Ed Yong’s masterful An Immense World, which I could not recommend more highly, not only for the content but also for the wonderful joyful writing throughout (AC/DC’s Rock and Roll Ain’t Noise Pollution even gets a mention!).

The recurring theme for me is how much we still don’t know about all of these animals, and the amazing new discoveries which are being made every year. Every animal perceives a different world from the one we think we are living in, many of these perceptions currently (and in some cases perhaps permanently) impossible for us to understand. It takes an extraordinary level of anthropomorphic arrogance for us to convert all of those strange and wonderful lives into the concept of natural capital.

The Institute and Faculty of Actuaries’ Biodiversity and Natural Capital Working Party defined natural capital in their paper from April 2021 (which acknowledges the concerns I am raising here and those raised by others) as follows:

The concept of ‘natural capital’ therefore aims to recognise nature as an asset and aims to ensure that
the goods and services offered by nature become a part of decision making by governments,
businesses, and individuals regarding resource allocation, growth and development.

The Dasgupta Review has gone further, focusing on the economics of diversity. As it acknowledges:

The Review has developed the economics of biodiversity by viewing Nature in anthropocentric
terms. That is an altogether narrow viewpoint, but it has a justification. If, as we have shown in
Part I, Nature should be protected and promoted even when valued solely for its uses to us, we
would have even stronger reasons to protect and promote it if we were to acknowledge that it
has intrinsic value.

I strongly disagree. As George Monbiot pointed out several years ago, markets change the meaning of the things we discuss, replacing moral obligations with commercial relationships. The latest article in The Actuary magazine on natural capital discusses ecosystem collapse in its final paragraph in terms of how it would “negatively impact GDP” and “economic value”.

Once the diversity of nature can be reduced to a monetary amount or metric value, it can obviously be modelled much more easily but, as we have seen again and again within the finance sector and elsewhere, that is at the expense of consideration of any other aspect of our relationship with it.

Perhaps cuttlefish do dream of the passive electroreception of sharks. If they only knew what we were up to, they might instead have nightmares about their balance sheet entries in our spreadsheets.

Black ball

Cartoon of a black ball powering the planet

Imagine all of the fossil fuel energy available to the Earth and its inhabitants before our emissions from using that energy mean that we will have, on average, a climate 1.5oC warmer than pre-industrial levels. Imagine it as a big black ball located, for convenience, in China, as we have exported many of the most carbon-intensive manufacturing processes we all need there, and that we are all sucking the energy we need from this black ball 24/7 until it is exhausted.

We are currently at 1.2oC above pre-industrial levels on average and have seen the consequences this summer in the UK, and in the unprecedented number and size of wildfires still raging across Spain and Portugal in particular, to name a few of the events which have been made much more likely by climate breakdown.

The last estimate of the size of the ball came from the IPCC AR6 Report of 2021, which indicated that the remaining carbon budget to remain with a 50% chance of staying at or below 1.5°C of global warming is 580 billion tonnes CO2 and about 420 billion tonnes CO2 for a two-thirds chance of limiting warming to 1.5°C, all as at 2018. Annual global CO2 emissions in 2019 were 36.7 billion tonnes, in 2020 they were 34.8 billion tonnes and in 2021 they rebounded to 36.4 billion tonnes. So that ball is shrinking very fast.

Why the obsession with 1.5°C? Well, it is what we and most other countries signed up to in Paris in 2015. 2°C was agreed to be a much worse outcome than 1.5°C – we can already see the results of current warming where 20% of the global population lives with 1.5°C warming in at least one season of the year, but a global average of 2°C compared to 1.5°C would increase the proportion of the population exposed to severe heatwaves at least once every 5 years from 14% to 37%. NASA have an article on this here.

Can we make the ball bigger, by removing some of the carbon dioxide? If you look at the pathways that the IPCC discuss, you will see that they are split between those where temperatures are stabilised at or below 1.5°C warming and those which go above but are then brought back down later in the century. In its most recent report published in April, the IPCC said the use of CO2 removal is now “unavoidable”, if the world is to reach net-zero greenhouse gas emissions. Where the UK is in its programme of carbon removal is discussed here. However, to get it into perspective, global carbon removal to date is still in the experimental stage, and there are many problems remaining to be overcome with most of the proposed methods, so such efforts must be additional rather than in anyway an alternative to drastically cutting our emissions.

Back to the ball. If this represented all of the remaining water in the world (the scientific consensus at 3°C warming has Indian monsoon rains failing, the Himalayan glaciers supplying the Indus, Ganges and Brahmaputra, the Mekong, Yangtze and Yellow rivers decreasing by up to 90% and the Amazonian rain forest basin drying out completely), would you think about it differently? Would you continue washing your car every weekend, watering your lawn, and power-washing your drives and patios on the assumption that we would invent a new way of making water? Simon Brodkin has done a good bit in answer to this, which is both very funny and terrifyingly plausible.

Ant Music

But how do they know where they’re going? Spikes! Stop eating them!

I am currently reading a wonderful book – An Immense World by Ed Yong – which I am certain will feature in much of my writing over the next few months. Today I want to talk about what Ed’s book has to say about ants and, in particular, ant pheromones.

Pheromones override all of an ant’s other senses. An ant will walk itself to death if its pheromone trails are laid in a circle (“the army ant death spiral”). And if an ant happens to get covered with one of the pheromones that signal that it is dead, it will continue to be treated as if it is dead however much it protests.

Compared to ants, the current Conservative Party leadership candidates obviously bestride the world like colossi, but I think I have spotted a similarity in the contest so far. Public First have attempted to put all of the policy announcements by each of the candidates together on a single spreadsheet and what is noticeable is that there is only one row which has an entry for every candidate: tax and economic growth. More popular than immigration, Brexit & Europe or any of the other issues one would expect any Conservative leader to have an immediate policy on. And, with one exception (the architect of the current economic policy which has been going in a different direction, Rishi Sunak), they all seem to be proposing a variation on generating economic growth as a result of tax cuts. I will not comment further on whether this is a coherent policy, as that has been done very well here.

However it did occur to me that tax cuts might be doing the same job for Prime Ministerial hopefuls as pheromones do for ants, ie something which, once emitted, makes everything else about your policy positions irrelevant. The problem of course is, whereas the success of an ant colony depends very largely on the coordination of a huge number of individual insects to follow a path, recognise an individual (or more likely a member of a group), identify their own young, etc, the leadership race is supposed to be giving the candidates a chance to differentiate themselves from each other. Even allowing for the fact that many in the race have no expectations of making the last two, but are merely indicating their level of ambition in a way designed to be noticed by one of the two who do, it does seem as if they have already coalesced into two teams – Ready For Rishi and Not Remotely Ready For Rishi. And noone running appears to be obviously looking for a job from Rishi Sunak.

The dangers of making policy a reflex rather than a reflective activity, particularly with respect to the economy, are obvious. Because the pheromones act on all of the ants, including those emitting them, this doesn’t suggest an eventual winner who is likely to be able to change economic direction beyond usual Conservative Party instincts, whatever is actually going on in the economy. Ed Yong has already used the army ant death spiral as a metaphor for the United States’ response to the pandemic.

It should all become a lot clearer tonight when the ones who cannot get 20 MPs to support them will drop out. It would be great if one of them would make a break with Elgar and use Ant Music as their campaign song instead. Then we would all know where we stood.

Fighting for meaning

I recently finished reading an excellent book about how to read Russian short stories: A Swim in a Pond in the Rain by George Saunders. Of course it is about much more than this, drawing on George’s 20 years of experiences of teaching a creative writing course at Syracuse University and his own writing experience (primarily a short story writer, he won the Booker Prize for his first novel in 2017: Lincoln in the Bardo. It has caused me to think more deeply about my teaching (I teach some mathematics, economics, professional skills and communication skills) as a result. The two pages where George talks about finding his literary “voice” are, for me, worth the price of the book on their own – I never really understood how critical this was and why noone I had read had talked about it in very clear terms before. I can also, at long last, see the point of literary criticism. This book is all about the fight for meaning, and a bare-knuckled fight it is at times.

I think finding your own voice can apply in any field, not just the creative ones. George describes realising that he did not belong on Hemingway Mountain and the process of finally accepting his own “Shit Hill” with huge power. But at least as a writer you know you are supposed to be finding your own distinct way of writing. I sometimes think that, in many professional careers, this is not widely encouraged.

However it is, in my view, massively important. Finding your voice in a professional career is about discovering what you are good at and what you are interested in and trying to bridge the gap between the two. It is about being prepared to learn from those around you, although not necessarily the thing they think they are trying to teach you. It is about being prepared to spend time, sometime considerable time, on mastering things which are important to you, even if they seem to have no importance to anyone else. In this way you will develop an independent professional career where you have something interesting to say in your chosen field.

This may sound very utopian to some, particularly those in the early years of a career where you may have little control over your workload or the structure of your working day. However that will not be the case for ever unless you choose it to be and, provided you do not lose the habits for finding your own voice in the meantime, the opportunities to do so will only grow.

What you may have gathered from this is that I see finding your voice, not as some quick process that takes place over a short period at the start of your career (at least not in the pursuits I have been involved in so far), but as a lifetime’s search. Mine didn’t really start until I was 40 and, health willing, will carry on for many years to come (I still have no real idea what my voice as a writer is yet).

Let’s all wish each other good luck on the quest!

Bring Two Brains’ Hammer Inside the Tent

 

While the NHS has been asked to find £22 billion in savings by 2020, the latest figures from the Student Loans Company show that over £13 billion has been found to fund student loans for 2016/17 alone, without increasing the Government’s deficit and without appearing in the Public Sector Borrowing Requirement until some time in the 2040s. How is this possible?

The key difference is that the money the Government provides in student loans are seen as just that: loans. However, unlike any other kind of loan (and the reason that commercial banks declined to join the SLC – which was the original plan and the reason it was set up with a company structure), only between 40 and 45% is expected ever to be repaid, the repayment term is limited to a maximum of 30 years and the payments limited to a percentage of earnings above a minimum earnings threshold (which is about to increase to £25,000 pa). It is in reality a graduate tax masquerading as a loan, with the “sticker price” of £9,250 pa (which is of course a real price for overseas students) just used to ensure students don’t feel like they are paying this tax on someone else’s behalf. However the payments made by the Government since 2011 as “loans” have not led to any outcry about uncosted commitments, or passing the bill onto future generations which you might expect. Which is surprising, as it has meant that Higher Education has effectively been allowed to sidestep the austerity policies applied to just about every other Government department completely.

One might think that the architect of such a scheme would be quite popular within the Higher Education space. Far from it. Since the announcement of his appointment as the new Chancellor at the University of Leicester, the Leicester branch of the UCU has widened the campaign it is already running against the Joint Negotiating Council’s decision to close the USS pension scheme to further defined benefit accrual to embrace a #WillettsOut position. The students who occupied the corridor outside the Leicester VC’s office for two days similarly had Willetts’ removal on their list.

Apart from elements of his voting record (he was strongly in favour of an elected House of Lords and was strongly against the ban on fox-hunting. TheyWorkForYou additionally records that, amongst other things, he was strongly in favour of the Iraq War, strongly in favour of an investigation into it, moderately against equal gay rights, and very strongly for replacing Trident), the main charges against him seemed to date from an article about him in the Guardian from 2011.

Now without minimising the differences of opinion which I and many of my colleagues will clearly have with David Willetts on a wide range of issues, I do think we are in danger of surrounding ourselves with the comfortable cushions of like-minded individuals all equally in the dark about the regulatory changes in store for us and at risk of all the worst consequences of Group Think. I would therefore like to put forward an alternative view.

The University of Leicester is facing, along with the rest of the Higher Education sector, serious challenges over the coming decades in response to an expansion of the proportion of young people going to university which no political party is going to want to reverse (and which I, for one, would not want them to). David Willetts was the chief driver of much of these reforms and has a clear vision of what they are trying to achieve, set out in his book A University Education. He is currently a visiting professor at King’s College London where he works with the Policy Institute at King’s, a visiting professor at the Cass Business School, Chair of the British Science Association, a member of the Council of the Institute for Fiscal Studies and an Honorary Fellow at Nuffield College, Oxford. However his real passion is around social mobility, something which I believe is important to many of us here at Leicester, and which has led him to a role as Executive Chair of the Resolution Foundation. As a former cabinet minister and shadow cabinet minister from 1996 until 2014, Willetts is very well connected, a formidable debater and would make a fierce friend of the University, fighting Leicester’s corner in what is likely to be an increasingly challenging period.

David Willetts would undoubtedly bring significant challenge with him. Arguing with him (I watched him in debate with Stefan Collini and a variably outraged university audience at the Senate House last year) can sometimes feel like doing battle with a hammer. But it may be that this is what we need to respond successfully to the new world which is coming rather than yet another comfortable cushion to make us feel better. Let’s welcome him inside the tent.